- John and Cassie, a young couple in Vermont struggling with an opioid addiction, go to extremes for each other as they try to track down the means to feed their habit.
- Set in the dreary, slow thaw of late winter in Vermont, State of the State chronicles the early stages of a naïve, hapless young couple's tragic descent into opioid addiction. The film follows John and Cassie as they attempt to satisfy their newly formed dependence and-with panic and desperation rapidly compounding-the need to score drugs begins to erode their judgment and corrupt their will.
A work accident and a sickness in the family introduced the otherwise content, small-town sweethearts to the underworld of drug dependency where they've found a temporary reprieve from their physical and emotional pain. Now, with their first genuinely harrowing withdrawal looming on the horizon, John and Cassie embark on a spate of messy attempts to score drugs. They hobble through interactions with family members, trying to conceal the nature of their illness due to their overwhelming shame, but also because one particular member of John and Cassie's family has a stake in their new life as addicts beyond the obvious.
John and Cassie waver perilously at the intersection of their addiction, their unvarnished love for one another, and a society that remains ill-equipped to deal with a public health crisis of this magnitude. Alienated from their family and community, the bonds of a young romance are tested as the severity of their addiction intensifies and the drama that it imposes on daily life inevitably culminates into one decisive action to deliver John and Cassie from the sickness of withdrawal.
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